Pith. sign in

REVIEW 2 cited by

Tackling the Minimal Superpermutation Problem

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 1408.5108 v1 pith:FAYG4U3U submitted 2014-08-21 math.CO cs.DS

classification math.COcs.DS
keywords problemsuperpermutationsymbolscounterexampleasymmetricbeenconjectureconjectured
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

Signed reviews

No signed human review yet.

0 comments
abstract

A superpermutation on $n$ symbols is a string that contains each of the $n!$ permutations of the $n$ symbols as a contiguous substring. The shortest superpermutation on $n$ symbols was conjectured to have length $\sum_{i=1}^n i!$. The conjecture had been verified for $n \leq 5$. We disprove it by exhibiting an explicit counterexample for $n=6$. This counterexample was found by encoding the problem as an instance of the (asymmetric) Traveling Salesman Problem, and searching for a solution using a powerful heuristic solver.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 2 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Supertrees

    math.CO 2019-08 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    The minimum size of a contiguous k-universal d-ary plane tree is exactly d^{k-1}+k-1; the noncontiguous variants have minimum sizes between roughly k log_2 k and k^{(1/2) log_2 k}.

  2. Superpermutation matrices

    math.CO 2019-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Defines superpermutation matrices, reduces their row/column minimization to a universal word problem for quotient classes in S_n, and proves the ratio of the resulting upper and lower bounds tends to 2 as n grows.

Pith tools